The Worst Kind of Surprise Party

[all_too_familiar]

There is a man. He's meditating, and floating several inches off of the ground. This is fairly normal for him - at least he's not floating various furniture this time. Just himself. He doesn't feel like exerting himself any further. It's been a long day.

He realizes it's going to be a lot longer when he's no longer in his room.

"I hate surprises," he sighs, and he opens his eyes to look at his new surroundings. He's still floating, and surprisingly calm.

Comments

[unmarred]

The strangely animate corpse grins. The grin says, With pleasure.

Then he reaches up lightning-fast and grabs the robed man's throat. The robed man yells something, and all the hooded figures throw their candles at the man in the circle.

As they tumble through the air, the flickering orange flames go dark. Now the only light in the room is from his lightsaber. And a column of hissing black flame engulfs him, painfully cold, swallowing his senses and cutting him off from his body and the Force.

[all_too_familiar]

If there were a hell, he would sincerely think this was it.

The loss of the Force is worse than the loss of his body. A thousand times worse. There is - nothing, nothing, nothing, this isn't death, this is worse. Death is nothing but the Force, a return to where one came, this is - this is - absence, nothing, falling alone in an empty dark void and not even having the air to scream.

And then his body returns, and the Force with it. Not all of it, just the faintest trickle, fuzzy and awkward and slow and weak. He's on the ground. He's on the ground and there are people with knives. And something - odd, he can't really tell what it is, but there's definitely a something.

Along with that comes rage.

"Aaaaaugh!" he roars, lashing out with his lightsaber and lightning.

[unmarred]

This does significant damage to the people with knives!

[all_too_familiar]

That is the point.

Three die before his sense of touch returns. His feel of the Force expands, languidly, slowly, and it's like he's a child again, only able to fumble at the things near him. But fumbling lets him know where they are, where he can slice, where he can shock, where he can grab with the Force - he's just as strong, he's not as weak as a padawan, he just feels like one - and snatch and toss.

He picks one of them up, flings them into another, and fries them both. He slices another in half. Another loses his knife and the arm attached. Another is kicked with enough force to break several ribs, and then he is impaled by his red lightsaber. Oh yes, now is the time for dual wielding. Fuck diplomacy, he is going to kill them all.

[unmarred]

At some point in this process he is going to notice the corpse fighting the robed man. Well. 'Fighting' may be an inexact description. They both move with superhuman speed and strength, but the corpse has precision and skill to go with it, and is ruthless in applying this advantage. The robed man is accumulating broken bones at an accelerating rate - he has completely lost the use of his left arm already.

Neither one of them is breathing, but this doesn't seem to slow them down.

[all_too_familiar]

Well, good for the corpse. He likely needs a bit of rage-fueled murder of his own. He doesn't think he'll interfere with a battle that's being won, and it's not like any of the people with knives are focused on anyone but him. Well. Actually most of them are too much of a mess to even continue fighting.

He kills the ones that can still fight. He kills all but one of the ones who can't. He stalks towards the last, growling. With two slices, he removes this person's limbs. He'll live long enough for his purposes. Probably. He turns off his lightsabers. He leans over his victim, snarling. It's time for some diplomacy of a different sort. He grabs his head with both hands, and reaches into it with the Force, and rips his language from his head.

This sort of thing is already painful. He's not feeling merciful. He makes it worse to get what he wants faster, he will not be stranded on some strange out of the way murder-cult planet and not know the language. He. Will. Speak it.

[unmarred]

Meanwhile, the corpse has the robed man pinned to the floor. The robed man struggles weakly, but doesn't have enough functioning limbs left to get anywhere.

"—would go a lot quicker if you'd tell me how to kill you," the corpse is saying.

The robed man whimpers with terror.

"No? Then I will just have to experiment."

[all_too_familiar]

Oh, there's his hearing back, now all that's left is sight, and a bit of the Force that's still creeping back.

And he has the language. Excellent.

"Want help? We can try lightning," he growls, in English, releasing his language victim. He draws his lightsaber - red, it seems wrong to use the purple one to kill an unarmed (ha) prisoner - and kills him. "Or my lightsaber. Either."

[unmarred]

"I have my doubts about lightning," the corpse murmurs. "As delightful as the prospect is. You should have your sight back in another minute and a half, by the way, if it's the same for you as it was for me."

Thoughtfully, he reaches down and breaks the robed man's neck. The body goes limp, but the head is still animate, and grimacing with terror.

"Evidently not that. Mm. If you're not planning on doing anything with that knife, could you give it here?"

[all_too_familiar]

"Good to know." He pauses, and tilts his head. "... What knife?"

He reaches out with the Force, looking for the knife.



"Oh," he says. He retrieves it from where it is stuck in his side. "Yeah, sure." He tosses it corpse-ward.

[unmarred]

Snort. "Thanks," he says, catching it with casual grace, and he hauls the robe off its owner's broken body and starts methodically opening up major blood vessels. The robed man doesn't quite bleed with proper force, but he does leak very messily.

"I don't advise touching his blood," the corpse adds as an afterthought. "He fed it to me to turn me into a vampire. The exsanguination was probably also a critical step, but there's no point in taking chances."

[all_too_familiar]

"I'll avoid it," he agrees. "And uh. Stop bleeding out. 'Scuse me."

He picks his way to a place that has the least amount of blood on the floor, and sits. And breathes. And - not much else, actually, to the casual viewer.

[unmarred]

But this is not a casual viewer.

He's distracted by his experiments, though. Removing considerable amounts of blood from the vampire's body does not seem to have killed him. Next, Mark tries dismemberment. The knife is not the best possible tool for this job, but it seems rude to interrupt... whatever the recently stabbed man is doing about his recent stab wound.

[all_too_familiar]

The recently stabbed man is healing himself, actually.

He'll be sitting there for a while. Injuries like this are kind of fiddly.

[unmarred]

In which case Mark will just continue disassembling the vampire into medium-sized pieces. He saves the head for last, because it seems likely to be more difficult than the rest.

The vampire's head is not quite fully detached from his torso - but there is a clear air gap between the two ends of his severed spine - when head, torso, and pile of vampire parts all explode into dust.

"That was unexpected," remarks the blood-covered man with the knife.

[all_too_familiar]

The blood-covered man without the knife opens an eye. Sight's back. That's nice.

"Wow, yeah. Convenient, though. Sort of."

[unmarred]

"Anyway. Decapitation is apparently the trick," he says. "Welcome to wherever the fuck we are."

[all_too_familiar]

He snorts.

"Thanks. I take issue with the cultural introduction here of stabbing. Let's not. Hello, I'm -" He hesitates, then smirks and shakes his head, apparently amused with himself. "Revan. Nice to meet you, wish it were under better circumstances, where the fuck are we? Some weird backwater planet of murder cultists?"

[unmarred]

"And I'm Mark. Pleased to meet you too. From the short conversation I had with this clod," he gestures at the dusty puddle of blood all around him, "before he temporarily murdered me, I believe we're on Earth, but it can't possibly be the Earth I grew up on because the Earth I grew up on did not contain vampires or magic."

[all_too_familiar]

"That name is completely unfamiliar to me. Uh, is it in some obscure planet in the Outer Rim, or further out?" Pause. "... Actually. I bet you haven't heard of - Coruscant, Corellia - The Republic?"

[unmarred]

"...On what planet did humans originate, where you're from?"

[all_too_familiar]

"Coruscant, probably. But we're kind of everywhere and history's a bit shoddy sometimes, so no one knows for sure. Did they originate on Earth for you?"

[unmarred]

"Yeah. Verifiably."

[all_too_familiar]

"Hmm. What's the interstellar neighborhood like? Any interesting species? Do you have hyperspace?"

[unmarred]

"The number of colonized planets is in the hundreds - maybe a hundred and fifty or two hundred. Preexisting life on a few, but nothing sapient other than humans. I don't know what you mean by hyperspace but contextually I suspect we don't."